I have 6 (!) reviews in the May 2026 issue of Booklist. I am breaking them up into 2 posts. Today I have my two starred review and a very hotly anticipated title that was also excellent.
As usual, these posts contain my draft review with bonus appeal into and more readalikes. Basically, all the stuff I could not fit into the review. Let's get right to it.
STAR
By Cynthia Pelayo
June 2026. 320p. Crooked Lane, $29.99 (9798892424448); paper, $19.99 (9798892424455). First published May 1, 2026 (Booklist).
With her latest fairy-tale inspired horror, Pelayo whisks readers away to 1914 London to meet Wendy Darling (24) still carrying the trauma from 12 years ago, when she and her brothers went missing from Kensington Gardens. 12 years since J.M. Barrie snatched their harrowing story from newspaper headlines, transforming it into a heartwarming tale. 12 years of Wendy being forced to hide her truth about the monster she has never been able to truly escape. Told almost exclusively by Wendy, readers see the story of Darling Children with clarity and terror, and they know without a doubt that Wendy is correct. Peter is coming back to get more children, and only she can stop him. Psychological horror at its best, told with evocative language and a simmering pace, building steadily, immersing readers in the oppressive and menacing atmosphere, allowing the danger that surrounds every character, in London and Neverland, in their past, present and future, to fully sink in, before it all bursts open, as the Darling children go back to Neverland to make their final stand. Like Charlie Manx’s Christmasland in Hill’s NOS42, Pelayo marks Pan’s Neverland for the horror it truly is. A great option for fans of Maguire’s popular Wayward Children series.
Three Words That Describe This Book: Strong Sense of Place, Meaning, Psychological Horror
Further Appeal: I CAN NEVER LOOK AT PETER PAN THE SAME WAY AGAIN. This is not your typical Peter Pan retelling. There is no romance here. It is the opposite. And it is very dark and terrifying.
The Peter we are presented with here is in the vein of Charlie Manx (from Joe Hill's NOS4A2). This really is Wendy vs Peter is Vic vs Manx. Both villains suck the joy out of the children they snatch to stay young. And Christmasland = Neverland.
Wendy has PTSD from what Peter did to her. She has guilt and grief over the boys she could not save. She has the trauma of an abused partner. She is a classic victim of abuse in a time when no one understood that. Readers understand that PTSD really wasn't considered a medical condition until AFTER WWI.
In Pelayo's hands, Barrie's stories about the Darling children are the happy version of what was a TRUE CRIME mystery that rocked Pelayos alternate London. The Darling's are famous for disappearing and reappearing, but they are also infamous because of the "crazy" things Wendy claims happened. But the world knows the story Barrie wrote. Barrie took her pain and turned it into joy. She has read everything he has written. People know it is about her. It is awful for her, every single day. She is like today's famous victims of evil men.
Kensington Garden as a place of MANY child abductions, no one believing or listening to Wendy, her being put into a mental hospital during her teen years to protect her from herself and her derangements. Her estrangement from her brothers because they all were told to push their trauma and feelings down.
But now it is 12 years later. Wendy is functioning, barely. She works at the orphanage where she lived after her stay in the hospital. She is the children's teacher. It is 1914 and WWI is just starting to ramp up. The specter of the war we know is to come overshadows everything. It is bad now with young men dying and being injured, children being given to the orphanages because their fathers have been killed and the mothers cannot raise all of their children alone.
Readers know things are bad but they will get worse. There is one mention of some coughing and it is enough to remind readers that after the war, the 1917 flu will come. The atmosphere is oppressive to start, so that everything that Wendy is experiencing is menacing right off the bat.
Pelayo uses the atmosphere and history of the time and place, overlays it with the "true" horror of what happened to the Darling children, and then slowly builds the horror. The whole book is like a pot of water that begins on low as Pelayo begins to turn up the heat. Once it is simmering, the boiling comes quick. But here is the thing, even as it clams down after almost boiling over, it is still simmering, rather fast. Why? because the end resolution of this book is a pause. Michael is off to war, the war will come to London, everyone will be affected, and then the flu will kill many. Oh, and a Second World War will come next. Readers know this. So even with a pleasant outcome to this story, the horror of what will come lingers on this story. That was so very well done.
Wendy is developed perfectly. She is bookish and anxious and so isolated. She has very few friends because she is not allowed to share her truth. That labels her as insane. So when she starts to see the signs in the children (from the first lines, Agnes, one of her charges, is during a bird skull because "he" told her to) that Peter is trying to entice them to Neverland she is on edge. But no one will deliver her, she knows that. And then more things happen, crows are attacking, her shadow is acting strange.
Pelayo moves Wendy in and out of her present and into her past. She enriches the Peter Pan story we all know with details that make us all think long and hard about how dark it really is. And then she adds the overlay that Peter is not a fun young man, but rather, he is a monster who uses the children to stay young and alive... (That is mentioned early)
This book is DARK., The writing though is beautiful. It draws you through as the true horror of Wendy's experiences as a 12 year old and her life now are built up. As she rejoins forces with her brothers to try to finally end Peter's reign of terror, things move faster, but they also get way more terrifying. And again, the ending will leave you satisfied but extremely uneasy because everyone's world in London is about to get a whole lot worse.
Further Readalikes: In the review above I did not include any Peter Pan retellings because it is so different. The only one that is close to as dark and as scary as Pelayo's is Wendy Darling by AC Wise. I also saw many parallels here to Pelayo's Children of Chicago.
STAR
By Craig DiLouie
June 2026. 304p. Run For It, paper, $19.99 (9780316578240); e-book (9780316578363).
REVIEW. First published May 1, 2026 (Booklist).
The slasher is a horror mainstay precisely because readers love to follow authors as they dole out the subgenre beats while finding novel ways to scare them. Some, like The Final Girl Support Group by Grandy Hendrix or I Was a Teenaged Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones, actively mine the well-trod trope itself for new angles, crafting stories that raise the bar for the entire subgenre. DiLouie’s latest falls into this latter category, presenting a summer camp slasher that introduces readers to two memorable final girls, but flips the script by narrating it through the eyes of the deputy who (always) arrives too late, and bubbles the investigation throughout. Tom was dating camp counselor Mary in 1983 when the Hungry Hare came out of the forest and killed everyone but her. Now in 1992, he is the officer on duty, arriving to find Laura covered in blood, the sole survivor of another horrific camp massacre. The key point of view switch puts readers on immediate notice*, and DiLouie rewards their attention with an exciting and original slasher featuring a terrifying folk horror twist that will drive fans to sign-up for the promised second session of Summer Fun Camp in droves.
Three Words That Describe This Book: slasher w/new perspective, folk horror, duology
FurtherAppeal: One of my first notes it “Tom is the narrator!” This is a big swap and it works great. Honors the tradition and everything that is good about the summer camp slasher of the 90s (it is set in 1992 with flashbacks to 1983) but adds an important twist-- instead of being from the POV of the final girl (girls here because we have Mary from the 1983 massacre and Laura from 1992) it is from the deputy's point of view.
Let's examine this-- I loved what DiLouie did here. His last two books were with a similar idea. He took the cursed film and the cursed band tropes (in back to back books) and tried to make them fresh and new. He succeeded to a point. I liked them. But I did not love them. They were solid entries into the subgenres but they did not move the subgenre forward as a whole.
By having this book be about 2 massacres at the same camp it is also paying homage to the fact that this subgenre is ruled by sequels. And its own sequel is coming this December-- Yule Day Slaughter.
And, there is a folk horror reason here-- The Hungry Hare-- and rules behind how the massacres happen that enhance the story as well.
This was everything it needed to be AND MORE, hence the star.
Further Readalikes: I was very impressed and entertained like with Final Girl Support Group by Hendrix or I Was a Teenaged Slasher by SGJ-- books that honor what is best about the slasher trope but alter the perspective and to add something new and exciting that enhances every book in the subgenre. All three of these titles are written by people who know this subgenre backwards and forward, the stories are written with expertise and love with a commitment to giving readers something entertaining and new.
The SGJ comp is the best one because there are some supernatural things at work here, things that have rules, rules that make sense to fans of the slasher. But also, if you are new to the subgenre, this books is enjoyable and full on its own.
I would also highly recommend The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi as an option here.
The nods to the Scream and Friday the 13th movie franchises are clear here as well.
By Nick Cutter
May 2026. 352p. Gallery, $29 (9781668079560).
REVIEW. First published May 1, 2026 (Booklist).
At its core, all horror is about death, but in his latest Cutter challenges readers to directly confront living, aging, and dying. Fred (78), awaiting assisted suicide, accepts a last-minute offer to participate in Dr Marsh’s experiment to reverse the aging process by merging the regenerative powers of jellyfish with the human body. Told with an omniscient narration, making it very clear that things are not going to go well, while also allowing readers to get into the heads of each character, including the 5 “subjects,” this is a gripping, original, and existentially terrifying story. Overt nods to well-known stories such as Frankenstein, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Jurassic Park allow the unease to increase organically as readers get swept up in the people, the drama, and the scientific wonder, until they find themselves stuck in its tendrils, facing the horror on the page and their own mortality. For fans of retellings in the vein of Unwieldy Creatures by Tsai or the immersive realism of SF-horror such as in Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Tremblay.
Three Words That Describe This Book: Frankenstein retelling, gripping, immersive. existential terror
Further Appeal: Most horror is at its core, about coming to terms with the fact that we will all die. Think about it. All of the undead creatures, ghosts, trying to defeat the supernatural monster in order to live and make better choices in your own life.
All of that is here in this novel. This one is on the nose about all of that. The wonder, the fear, the horror of coming to terms with your own death and making the choice to have a chance to live forever instead. All of the horror of not being able to die but also what does that mean if no one can die. And also, we are not meant to live together so what does that do to our bodies and our humanity?
What is even more terrifying here is that our protagonists are choosing to be part of a scientific experiment to reverse their own aging. Literally minutes from doing assisted suicide, they instead take an offer to go to a remote island in far northern Lake Huron (Canada) and be part of an experiment, knowing full well it could go "hinky" but figuring they have nothing to lose.
Dr Marsh-- the prodigy scientist in charge is 19 (Mary Shelley's age when she wrote Frankenstein), she makes more than one mention about reading the Shelley novel and how she will make different choices than Dr. Frankenstein with her monsters. But there is more in this book that makes allusions to the classic.
Readers will be hard pressed not to think about Michael Crichton in general and Jurassic Park in particular here. But also while Dr Marsh and her subjects are undergoing a well described experiment (involving jellyfish-- which was a cool addition to the horror monster world).
The title also refers to The Picture of Dorian Gray-- the subjects call themselves the Dorian Grays. And Algernon (from Flowers for Algernon) is also mentioned.
All of these allusions are on purpose in a good way-- to prepare readers for what is coming, to serve as a short hand to give Cutter the space to tell HIS original and unique take on this type of story. A cautionary tale about playing god, a scientific advancement can go too far, the mad scientist out for power over life itself, etc.... As a reader, Cutter brings you under the umbrella and says-- hey, you've seen this before-- but then he also says-- watch me bring my own take on it. That was fun.
In terms of storytelling, it is all done with an omniscient narrator that gets into the heads of all of the characters at some point. The "subjects"-- our 5 seniors who go through with the experiment-- and the 2 scientists (Marsh and a bio ethicist), 2 indigenous workers, and a few more to come when you read-- all of them are fleshed out well. We get to see how they appear
Cutter is a great storyteller. This is a gripping story. You will want to keep reading. Most reminded me of a mixture of The Troop and The Queen by him, but decidedly less gory than most of his books.
Thought provoking and heartbreaking. It will make you angry in a bunch of ways, but also it will terrify everyone who reads it because (and I do think Cutter wants readers to make this connection even though it is not there explicitly) your thoughts will go to AI right away. There is no AI here, but the story-- a scientist working on a technology that has a mind of its own that could do a lot of good, but also a lot of harm. I recently finished Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay and there is a lot of similarity here in appeal even though the plots are VERY different on the surface.
Horror that reaches its tendrils out to grab hold of the reader.-- These words are important.
Further Readalikes: If you combine the two in the review above, this is the book in feel and general storyline. The Tremblay is not out yet, but I have read it and had a starred review in the April issue of LJ. Addie Brook Tsai's Unwieldy Creatures was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award when it came out back in 2022, but I feel like it has been a bit forgotten. I hope this review brings it back.
But there are many classics Cutter invokes in order to help give readers a road map to what he is trying to do here. Those include, Frankenstein by Mary Shelly, Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, The
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Any familiarity with these titles, gives readers a sense of what to expect.
Also, I think a tangential suggestion is Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
Three more reviews from this issue coming tomorrow
